As is well known, the male counterpart or plug of an electric connector is attached to an electric apparatus and the female counterpart or receptacle of the electric connector is attached to another electric apparatus to permit transmission of electric signals from one to the other when the plug and receptacle are mated together. A variety of such electric connectors are widely used.
As a matter of necessity, many such electric apparatuses require grounded electric connectors. At the same time, the static electricity can be discharged from a person handling the electric connector to an appropriate conductive object, thereby shielding the terminals of the electric connector.
A conventional electric connector often has some extra grounding terminals other than electric signal transmission terminal pins, and the electric connector has a metal shield attached to its terminal housing for permitting the discharging of the static electricity from a person handling the electric connector at the time of coupling the plug to the receptacle of the electric connector.
As described, the conventional electric connector has different and separate elements allotted to grounding and destaticizing respectively. This leads to the following disadvantages: an increase in the number of parts to be assembled because of the elements used for grounding and destaticizing are duplicated; the increased number of parts each of the plug and receptacle limits reduction of the connector size; and the increased number of parts makes it difficult to improve the efficiency of manufacturing the connector.
Such structure becomes further complicated when the connector is intended to be mounted to an apparatus in a floating manner.